It's a great question. I haven't finished writing the book yet, but what we're working on is looking at the ways in which.... Well, it's in contrast with the situation in the 1980s, when these kinds of issues were still seen as relatively discrete in that they didn't apply to everyone. In what I'm calling a surveillance culture, people have a kind of surveillance imaginary, a sense of what's going on, and engage in practices that relate to surveillance, whether it's avoiding certain kinds of surveillance or actively participating in them or complying or negotiating or whatever.
In talking about surveillance culture, I'm trying to draw attention to the fact that there's no point in talking about a surveillance state anymore, or even a surveillance society, although those are important concepts. We have to think about the ways in which people in everyday life interact in numerous ways, and increasingly, with all kinds of surveillance.
Of course, I'm understanding surveillance in the broad sense of any kind of activity or experience of gathering and analyzing personal information for all kinds of purposes, whether they be for influence, control, management, or whatever. I'm working with a fairly wide definition of surveillance that, again, was not envisaged by those who were writing the Privacy Act in the 1980s. I'm thinking of situations, for example, where people are engaged with social media and are actually very aware of the kinds of risks that they take in certain kinds of communication, certain kinds of web-browsing, and so on and so forth.
That culture of surveillance that is developing in many different aspects actually has an effect on the ways in which surveillance is carried out and privacy is maintained, and for all that some say that privacy is less of a matter of interest to younger people who are using social media, in fact you discover that there's a very sophisticated and complex understanding of privacy. This relates both to the big issues of the charter, for example, and to the small issues, such as which particular party you do or do not want your own communications to be open to.
Therefore, I'm thinking of something that is developing in Canada and in other countries that affects our understanding of what it is to be enjoying privacy, our understanding of what it is to be under surveillance, and how those understandings and those practices make a difference to the ways in which surveillance actually works—to its very efficacy—and also to privacy.